Author: Ldavis0260

1-11-2026

    This country’s vaunted credo that it was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” has always turned to ash in the mouths of those of us who are descendants of this land’s original inhabitants or descendants of those who were brought here in chains to labor for free.  The descendants of the men who signed that declaration recognized the inherent contradiction between their lofty statements and the ugly truth of how they forged this nation from genocide and slavery.  They invented racism to resolve the contradiction and dedicated decades convincing generations of white Americans that Black people were inherently inferior beings who belonged at the bottom of the societal hierarchy and that the citizenship of all non-white people was conditional, bestowed or withheld at the whim of white people.

      Black Americans’ astonishing track record of invention and creation disproved this at every turn. Those who know even a little history know that Black people have spent two and a half centuries fighting to force this country to live up to its statements for all Americans. What has been buried is that there have been white accomplices all along.  There have always been white people who rejected their precarious position on the top floor of a house of cards; those who wanted no part of a system that told them that all they had to do was be white; that they were guaranteed safety and security as long as they didn’t question it, as long as they didn’t make common cause with those that Derrick Bell called the “faces at the bottom of the well.”  

    Time and time again, this system has punished those white people who stepped out of line, as a warning to all the others.  In 1965, it was Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit education activist who ran towards danger in Selma, Alabama to see how she could help the freedom movement.  She was murdered by 4 Klan members, including an FBI informant, who shot Liuzzo in the head while she was driving other activists from Selma to Montgomery.  After her death, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, smeared Liuzzo as a drug addict who went to Selma to have sex with Black men, (Source:  “Viola Liuzzo,” Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/violaliuzzo.html).

     In 2017 it was Heather Heyer, a 32 year old paralegal killed when a 21 year old white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of protesters marching against the “Unite the Right” Rally.  Heyer was a “passionate advocate for the disenfranchised,” who dumped a boyfriend who made racist remarks about her Black boss, (Source:  “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman,” by Christina Caron, The New York Times, 8/13/2017).

      This week it was Renee Good, murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who called her a “f—king bitch,” moments after shooting her in the head.  Like Viola Liuzzo before her, Good was immediately maligned by puppy killer Kristi Noem, who called Good a domestic terrorist before we even knew her name. We can assume that J.D. Vance echoed these slurs to prevent any Fox News watchers from having sympathy for a woman who her wife, Becca described as living by the “conviction that every person — regardless of ‘where you come from or what you look like’ deserves compassion and kindness,” (Source:  “Renee Macklin Good’s wife says she nurtured kindness,” by Cari Spencer and MPR News Staff, mprnews.org, 1/9/2026).

      Over time, it has taken less and less to evoke white supremacist violence.  Viola Liuzzo was actively assisting civil rights workers when she was murdered by the Klan.  Heather Heyer was killed at a protest.  Renee Good was merely documenting ICE activity in an effort to keep her neighbors safe.  We are in an Orwellian dystopia where the slightest expression of empathy gets you labeled a domestic terrorist by a federal government full of evil sociopaths who relish violence. The lesson of Renee Good’s murder isn’t that looking away will keep you safe.  The lesson is that you never were.

March 30, 2025

    This country has been rendered unrecognizable and it has not even been 100 days.  Trump and Musk have crippled or shuttered critical agencies, from USAID  to the Social Security Administration to the Veterans Administration. They have fired almost 50,000 federal workers, pushed almost 75,000 others to take buyouts and have plans to cut almost 200,000 more, (Source:  “What We Know About Cuts to the Federal Workforce,” by Elena Shao and Ashley Wu, The New York Times, 3/28/25).  DOGE even attempted to abruptly cut funding for medical research, (including cancer!), but was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

    Speech has been criminalized.  200 Venezuelan men were rounded up and shipped to a slave labor camp in another country, without due process, for the crime of having tattoos, including one promoting autism awareness, (Source:  “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos,” by Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias, MotherJones.com, 3/26/25).  Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who is a legal green card holder married to an American citizen, was arrested in his apartment and shipped to a detention center in Jena, Louisiana, over a thousand miles away from his pregnant wife, (Source:  “Immigration agents arrest Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University protests,” by Jake Offenhartz, apnews.com, 3/9/25).  Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and PhD candidate at Tufts University, was kidnapped off of the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by six masked plainclothes ICE agents and shipped to the same Louisiana detention center despite a court order mandating that she remain in Massachusetts.  Ozturk’s offense, co-writing an Op-Ed in the student newspaper a year ago critical of the university’s stance on the war in Gaza, (Source:  “Federal Government Detains International Student at Tufts,” by Jenna Russell, Safak Timur, Anemona Hartocollis, and Eduardo Medina, The New York Times, 3/26/25).

      Yet this administration is not limiting itself to the low hanging fruit of foreign students and asylum seekers.  Trump has issued an array of executive orders targeting law firms, ranging from efforts to control their hiring practices to deeming them national security threats. Trump, channeling his inner Louis XIV, has conflated efforts to prosecute him with attacks on the country, deeming firms that were affiliated with Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, and Mark Pomerantz as national security threats.  Trump attacked Perkins Coie for its role in connection with the Steele dossier.

    Trump targeted Columbia University, holding hundreds of millions in federal grant money hostage unless they acceded to his demands.  Columbia caved, agreeing to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department into receivership.  It was a stunning capitulation, an abdication of the principle of academic freedom that is central to the definition of a university.  Unsurprisingly, the $400 million dollars of scientific research funding has not yet been restored.

     Trump’s regime is following the playbook laid out by ultra right wing “thinker,” Curtis Yarvin, destroying the century old federal government bureaucracy that has protected ordinary citizens and attacking the pillars of civil society — the rule of law and the academy.  They seek not only to erase constitutional democracy, but the Enlightenment itself, (Source:  “The Interview:  Curtis Yarvin says democracy is done. Powerful conservatives are listening,” by David Marchese, The New York Times, 1/18/25).

     The cherry on this sh-t sundae is Signalgate, where top administration officials communicated detailed attack plans over Signal, a commercial messaging app that is not approved for government use because it is not secure, and included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the chat.  When Goldberg published the story on March 24th, all of the people involved downplayed the seriousness of the security breach, calling Goldberg a liar and denying that anything in the chat was classified.  Goldberg responded by publishing the entire thread two days later, (Source:   “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump Advisors Shared on Signal” by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 3/26/25).

    The full chat, which gave precise information about weapons and timing, included emojis and insults aimed at our European allies.  It reads like the chat of a group of high school boys playing Call of Duty, not senior level national security officials.  We are governed by a cabal of stupid criminals whose malevolence is only exceeded by their recklessness.  With RFK Jr’s campaign to rid the country of an effective vaccination program and Trump’s effort to legitimize the long debunked theory of scientific racism by executive order, it is as if we are in a dystopian “Back to the Future” remake, hurtling back in time to the McKinley era and there is no DeLorean to bring us back.

     War has been declared on us, the American people, by an unholy alliance of Christian nationalists and technofascists.  They are not satisfied with immiserating Black people, trans kids, Latino immigrants, or pro-Palestinian graduate students.  They are coming for everyone and we’d better recognize it.  Protests and boycotts are proof that we aren’t complacent, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that will be enough.  The stakes are really high and your privilege will not protect you.  Even if you have the complexion for protection and enough money to ride out inflation and stock market losses, we all breathe the same air, drink the same water and rely on the federal government to make sure our food and medicine is safe.  Like I said, they are coming for all of us.

   That means each of us has a decision to make.  Are we going to try to bargain with monsters, in the hopes of delaying the inevitable, to hold onto our privilege?  Or are we going to channel our most noble ancestors and do what they did, take a risk for something bigger than themselves?

      The Black and white Freedom Riders were violently assaulted, nearly burned alive when their bus was firebombed, arrested and jailed, merely for standing up for the simple principle that Black Americans were equal citizens entitled to ride on desegregated public transportation.  The Eagle Squadron was a group of American pilots who snuck into the U.K. two years before Pearl Harbor to join the RAF to fight the Nazis. 89% of their pilots died in combat. 

       The conflict we are facing now is just as stark. It is whether 330 million Americans will be ruled by a group of amoral sociopaths who mistake hatred for a personality. They don’t believe in democracy, want to crash the economy, decimate public education, and eliminate the social safety net in order to have a ready supply of desperate people that they can enslave.  They hope those of us too old or too sick to serve them will die. Given what we’re up against, avoiding risk is a fantasy.  The question for each of us is what are we most afraid to lose— our comfort or our principles?

December 15, 2024

    If we have learned nothing in the 40 days since Election Day, we have learned that white men can get away with anything and pretty white men can get away with murder. Although Trump won the presidency by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century, the response from the mainstream media and the Democratic Party has been one of appeasement and timidity that would make Neville Chamberlain blush.

   After months of beating the drum that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, “Morning Joe” hosts Joe and Mika wasted no time in racing to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring.   They then had the temerity to scold their audience for calling them out on their 180, (Source:  “At the crossroads of news and opinion, “Morning Joe” hosts grapple with aftermath of Trump meeting,” by David Bauder, ap.com (11/26/24).

      The 2024 edition of the Trump transition serves up a fresh hell every day.  Each new cabinet nominee is compromised and incompetent.  Several are also sexual predators.  Trump has proposed establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”),a new federal agency tasked with “eliminating government waste” and cutting Two Trillion Dollars from the federal budget.  To lead this effort, Trump has tapped a drug-addled billionaire with nostalgia for apartheid and a bootlicking poseur, neither of whom has any idea how government works.  We know that DOGE’s real mission is to purge the government of experts and regulators in order to grease the skids for naked profiteering for Trump’s corrupt cronies.  A key aide to FDA designee, RFK, Jr. sued to revoke the authorization of the polio vaccine, one of the true miracles of modern medicine, (Source:  ““RFK Jr key adviser petitioned regulators to revoke approval of polio vaccine,” by Ed Pillington, The Guardian, 12/13/24).  Trump is assembling a horde of demented ghouls who will wreak havoc on the health and safety of 330 million Americans.

   Yet the response of Congressional Democrats has been disappointing, to put it mildly.  Congressman Ro Khanna posted a credulous opinion about working with DOGE to cut defense spending, as if Musk, whose SpaceX is a defense contractor, is going to focus cuts in that sector.  Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman decided to use his debut on Trump’s Truth Social to call for Trump to be pardoned in his New York State “hush money” convictions, wasting no time in placing another target on the back of Alvin Bragg, the Black D.A. who secured those convictions, (Source: “First Democratic Senator Joins Truth Social,” by Irie Sentner, Politico.com, 12/11/24).

     Meanwhile, the broligarchs who run social media platforms and other tech companies have been rushing to show their fealty, pledging seven figure contributions to Trump’s inaugural festivities, (Source: “Meta, Amazon, and tech CEOs make $1 million investments in Trump’s inauguration,” by Kathryn Watson, Libby Cathey, CBSNews.com, 12/11/24).

   These are truly disturbing harbingers of things to come.  Trump has never been shy about his aim- to destroy our current system, flawed as it may be, and replace it with one that rewards his friends and punishes his enemies.  Trump believes that the Rule of Law is for suckers, and has always acted accordingly.  His behavior is not surprising.  What is shocking is seeing how quickly and completely those who derived the most benefit from the American legal system are folding like a house of cards.

     Their obeisance speaks volumes.  They are capitulating because they don’t think they will suffer and don’t care about those of us who will. They think that they have enough money or intellect to either buy off or outwit Trump.  They don’t really oppose white supremacy, they just don’t want to get their hands dirty.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at how quickly Jordan Neely’s murderer was lionized. Good Morning America rushed to book him for an “exclusive” interview, a mere 48 hours after his acquittal, and a mere 24 hours after Jordan’s father tearfully asked at a rally,”What are we going to do people?  What is going to happen to us now?  The system is rigged.”  What, indeed, when a vigilante can murder a mentally ill Black person on the subway and not only escape accountability, but be celebrated?”

     But the assassination of United Healthcare CEO by pretty boy killer, Luigi Mangione, is proof that everyone is at risk in a society without the Rule of Law.  Although it’s true that Mangione is in jail and may spend the rest of his life there, Brian Thompson is still dead.  The public reaction to Thompson’s murder should be a warning to those who think they have nothing to lose in the coming kakistocracy.  If you create a society awash in guns and elevate a government that treats its people not as citizens to be protectedg but as marks to be fleeced in a highest stakes game of Three Card Monte, marginalized folks won’t be the only targets.

      All I know is that Black people in this country have a centuries’ long head start on how it feels to be hated and hunted.  We know how to create community and take care of each other.  As for the folks who think they have nothing to lose, we’ll see how that works out for you.

November 10, 2024

   “A republic.  If you can keep it.”  Ever since Tuesday, I have been unable to get Benjamin Franklin’s quote out of my head.  Now that 70 million Americans have made clear that they would rather have a racist criminal lead this country than an intelligent and honest Black and Asian woman, I suppose we know the answer.

     I am shell shocked and grieving, as if a loved one has died.  In a manner of speaking it has.  To me, and to many Black women, what died on Tuesday was a dream of what America could be.

     We are not naive.  We know that we have always loved this country more than it has loved us.  We have always known the real America, not the whitewashed version peddled in Chevy truck ads and NFL games.  We love it anyway, because America is our home, one that we built.  A country whose blood soaked soil gave birth to our spirituals and our blues, which blossomed into our jazz, rock & roll, R&B, and hip hop.

    We believed in ourselves.  Against mountains of evidence to the contrary, we believed that we could forge a life in this country, our country, even as white people kept defining American to mean everyone but us. 

     After the Civil War, we built our own communities with the first public schools in the South open to Black and white children. White people, lost without us to look down on, burned our communities to the ground and passed laws to push us out of the schools we founded.

    Through it all, Black people remained undaunted.  We kept pushing, kept creating, kept trying to force this country to live up to the “better angels of [its] nature.”  Brilliant Black people used every available strategy-  marches, boycotts, lawsuits.  We put our literal bodies on the line for freedom and democracy.  If Americans are being honest,  they know that any measure of freedom afforded to all other marginalized groups rests on the foundation of Black freedom struggles.

     America responded to Black people’s efforts to perfect the union by assassinating our leaders and infiltrating and sabotaging our organizations. After a mere decade of hard won progress, backlash was swift. America elected Nixon who started the war on drugs to engineer the mass incarceration of Black people.  When Nixon resigned in disgrace, Black people enjoyed a brief respite from governmental persecution under President Carter, only to have the country elect a B movie actor who launched his campaign in the Mississippi town where voting rights activists, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered.

    The pendulum has swung back and forth ever since.  White Americans vote for Republicans for their promise to enact policies that maintain a strict racial hierarchy.  When those policies begin to hurt them too, white people elect Democrats.  Although people mistakenly believed that the 2008 election of Barack Obama meant that we had broken that cycle, Trump’s victory in 2016 proved just how wrong we were.

     His cruel and chaotic presidency created a permission structure for an avalanche of naked racism, misogyny and antisemitism.  We can excuse voters in 2016 for not knowing the full extent of Trump’s venality, but watching white commentators twist themselves in knots to avoid calling out the obvious misogynoir behind Kamala Harris’s defeat is enraging.

     Trump represents the absolute worst aspects of the American character.  In addition to being a hate-addled, narcissistic meat sack who spews an incomprehensible word salad of petty grievances and 70’s cultural references, Trump is a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter.  The idea that people voted for him because the most pro-union administration in decades didn’t address the concerns of the working class is patently absurd.

     Let’s be real. People voted for Trump because he is a protection racket for anti-Black male mediocrity. The national abortion ban is designed to kneecap American women who have been outstripping men educationally and economically for years.  Trump’s unapologetically white nationalist agenda— outlawing DEI and the teaching of Black history is designed to eliminate competition from Black people and cement a belief in Black inferiority.

     The incoming Trump administration won’t merely be sexist and racist.  It will be hostile to labor, to regulations and to sane fiscal policy.  Other than the wealthy, Americans can expect to be sicker and poorer.  Black women have tried to save this country for the last time.  Too many of you clearly decided that what DuBois called the “psychological wages of whiteness” was more important than democracy.  Black women have two words— Good Luck.

September 25, 2024

     Marcellus Williams was lynched yesterday, (“Missouri executes Marcellus Williams, despite prosecutor’s objections,” by Kim Bellware, The Washington Post, 9/25/24).  Just because there are no grisly photos of a charred body hanging by a rope in the woods doesn’t mean that the murder of Marcellus Williams by the state of Missouri was not a lynching. Just because we don’t have photos of white families gathered around his corpse grinning and taking fingers as souvenirs doesn’t mean that those responsible for his death are any less gleeful.

     It is clear that Missouri Governor Mike Parson, state Attorney General, Andrew Bailey and U.S. Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas are no less racist and indifferent to Constitutional guarantees of due process than Justice Roger Taney who wrote in the Dred Scott decision that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Clearly, all that matters to these people is the power to indulge the bloodlust for Black lives.

      They are no different than Trump and J.D. Vance, whose relentless assaults on the innocent, lawful Haitian residents of  Springfield, Ohio, have destabilized the entire city and left Haitian residents fearing for their lives. These people want Black people dead and they will abandon facts and spread vile, dehumanizing lies to accomplish that goal.

     Sadly, these sentiments are hardly contained to Republican officials, as evidenced by the case of the white student at Gettysburg College who carved the word, “n—ger” into the chest of his lone Black teammate on the school’s swim team, (“A student has left Gettysburg College after a racial slur was etched onto a student’s chest, officials say,” by Lauren Mascarenhas and Paradise Afshar, CNN.com).  Or consider that, in a race for the presidency between an obviously impaired, racist criminal who lacks intellect or impulse control, or the Black and South Asian Vice President who has dedicated her life to public service, 52% of white voters choose the racist (Source:  Poll:  Newly popular Harris builds momentum, challenging Trump for the mantle of change,” NBCNews.com).

     Even though the theme of Kamala Harris’s campaign is “freedom,” for Trump, Vance, and the 52% of white Americans who support them, the definition of freedom is not the ability to control your own body, choose who you love, or pursue life, liberty and happiness.  For them, freedom means the ability to murder, maim, and humiliate Black people with impunity. They will welcome fascism with open arms to keep it.  41 days.

March 25, 2024

     A week ago, courtesy of the activist group Until Freedom, I attended a screening of Origin, Ava DuVernay’s brilliant adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking book, Caste.  The film could not have arrived at a better time than now, as we confront regimes around the world determined to uphold or install rigid caste systems that arbitrarily cement a marginalized group to permanent lower class status. 

      Both the film and the book powerfully make the point that societies that ruthlessly dehumanize one segment of their society in order to mark them for subjugation or extermination have more similarities than differences.  They draw parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany, who modeled their Nuremberg Laws after the Jim Crow laws of the American South. Origin and Caste also do a deep dive into the original caste system in India, exploring the harsh persecution of the Dalit people.

     Origin does not argue that the caste systems of the United States, Nazi Germany and India are identical, but that they share common structural features, giving us a framework for understanding how such systems persist or re-emerge, so that we can recognize the danger signs.

      We are at such a moment in the United States right now, and the lights are blinking red. The outcome of this presidential election will determine whether we hurtle backwards 100 years, or continue our fitful journey towards embracing multiracial democracy. The signs are not good.  Although many Black people, LGBTQ people and women of all races have been shouting from the rooftops that Trump and this version of the Republican Party pose an existential threat to democracy, a disturbingly large number of people seem oddly complacent.

     Even though several of Trump’s former staffers say he is unfit for office and his own Vice President refuses to endorse him, one of our major broadcast networks, NBC, responded by hiring former RNC chair and election denier, Ronna McDaniel, as a political analyst.  When Trump promised a bloodbath if he loses and called migrants “animals” at a rally, the initial defense by Republican apologists  was to ask us to put Trump’s remarks “in context.”  As Mehdi Hassan said, the context is that these were statements made by a man who fomented an insurrection in which people were killed, (Source:  “Trump, a ‘Bloodbath’ and ‘The Banality of Crazy,’” by Mehdi Hassan, Zeteo.com, 3/18/24).

     Trump’s full-throated embrace of the most vile stereotypes and his efforts during his first presidency to enact policies to persecute everyone from Black people, to Muslims, to asylum seekers to Trans people created a permission structure for everybody else.  Americans are no longer shy about saying the quiet part out loud and an entire movement funded by billionaires has been supercharged to ban Black history and queer lives and to reduce every woman to a breeding vessel with no control over her own body.  This movement seeks nothing less than to torch every program or initiative that tries to level the playing field for Black people and other marginalized groups of Americans and remedy past discrimination.  They want to return to the jurisprudence of the Dred Scott decision, where Black people had “no rights the white man was bound to respect.”

      As Nikole Hannah Jones detailed in her essay in The New York Times, just as the right had a 50 year game plan for overturning Roe v. Wade, from the moment that Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, the right made a plan to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement, (Source:  “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap. How A Civil Rights Idea Got Hijacked,” by Nikole Hannah Jones, The New York Times, 3/13/24).  Conservative Justices redefined  affirmative action to mean the pursuit of “diversity” for its own sake, rather than the redress of the continuing harm suffered by Black Americans as a result of slavery and the ensuing 100 year Jim Crow regime of segregation and terror. Recasting the goal of affirmative action as “cosmetic,” rather than rooted in justice, made it much easier to attack and dismantle.

     This is how we find ourselves in the present moment, where tech bros embrace debunked and discredited “scientific racism” and bankroll the quacks who peddle it, (Source:  “Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires,” by Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, 8/12/23).  Dope-addled Klan Wizard Elon Musk platforms the most vile antisemitism and racism, retweeting “great replacement theory” posts and blaming Boeing’s faulty door plugs on Black pilots.    The continuing decision by major media outlets to platform these people and sanitize their truly hateful and anti-democratic ideas is evidence either that our media is so warped by greed they don’t care about the content, as long as it gets views or that they’re silently hoping to re-establish a rigid white, patriarchal, supremacist caste system, with Black people permanently at the bottom, queer people back in the closet and women the virtual property of men.  As Sinclair Lewis warned us nearly a century ago, don’t think it can’t happen here.